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Medifast sells weight-loss products including "meal options that range from bars and shakes to hearty soups." The Medifast weight loss program requires that clients "choose five of 70 Medifast meals" eat one bar at breakfast, another at lunch, and then consume one meal that they prepare for themselves.

Within the next five years, MacDonald forecasts that Medifast will become a billion dollar company. He sees its Take Shape for Life unit growing from its current $200 million; its franchises expanding from 32 amd to open 40 more centers in the next three or four years; and its partnership with MedEx, a Mexican pharmaceutical company that will distribute its products as a way prevent obesity among citizens in Mexico City through 5,000 physicians.

Jenny Craig

Jenny Craig -- it offers personalized counseling through 700 retail outlets, over the phone or Internet and sells 80 food items -- is struggling. According to its June 2012 Half Year report, "Unfortunately, [Jenny Craig] continues to be under pressure in the U.S. We continue to take corrective actions and it's taking longer time for us to see some results to materialize.”

But as Jenny Craig CEO, Dana Fiser, explained in an October 26 interview, the company has a huge growth opportunity thanks to its approach to alleviating the growing obesity and epidemic. According to Fiser, "Projected increases in obesity rates and heart disease by 2030 are shocking." Fiser believes that Jenny Craig meets the need -- underscored by this epidemic -- for a "more proactive approach to weight loss and weight management."

PMRI

PMRI is tapping its influence -- Bill Clinton is a fan of Ornish's approach -- and reams of medical research to encourage people to make diet and lifestyle changes that can reverse heart disease, cancer, and other diseases.

In an October 10 interview from his Sausalito, Calif.-office, Ornish explained that he set up PMRI in 1993 as a public non-profit research institute to investigate the effects of diet and lifestyle choices on health and disease.

Ornish cited a series of studies published in medical journals indicating that changes to diet and lifestyle could:

Reverse heart disease,

Help people lose 16 pounds within a year,

Slow the growth of prostate cancer, and

Change the makeup of genes by adding telomerase to them.

He took his program around the U.S. -- training health care practitioners from "Nebraska to the Cleveland Clinic." And he found the program could achieve very good results for other practitioners -- "Blue Cross/Blue Shield reduced the cost to treat patients for certain cases by 50% in the first year and 20% in the second and third years."

Ornish was proud to note that after years of PMRI’s effort, Medicare officials reviewed the medical research necessary to conclude that Medicare should cover patients’ costs for the Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease, which teaches a plant-based, meatless diet, meditation and regular exercise.

This program costs about $30,000 per patient. In 2010, Medicare officially approved this program as an intensive cardiac rehab program, and the first patients started in May 2011.

But making money is not Ornish's goal; instead he says, “I should make enough to get by. The true measure of my life will be how many lives I changed for the better.”

The opportunity to help Americans fight fat is huge and growing -- and in this fragmented market there are plenty of ways to make money off of it. Whether any of them permanently reverse the trend remains to be seen.